Wink Silk  ·  Our Story

The Woman Behind Wink Silk

My name is Erin Wise. I'm the founder and Creative Director of Wink Silk.

I didn't set out to build a luxury silk brand. I set out to survive, and somewhere inside that fight, I found something I needed to make.

I was 44 years old when I was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. CLL. Not the kind where they say "watch and wait." Mine came back unmutated IGHV with CD38 positivity, a high-risk molecular profile that meant my cancer was more aggressive, more likely to progress, and required a treatment approach that had to be chosen very carefully. My oncology team had initially planned for FCR chemotherapy, a standard frontline regimen.

But unmutated IGHV changes everything.

FCR chemotherapy in patients with my profile carries significantly higher risk of disease transformation. They pivoted to Venetoclax and Obinutuzumab, V+O, an intensive targeted chemo-immunotherapy designed for high-risk CLL.

Over the next year and a half, I went through that treatment. And throughout that time, the Venetoclax had to be paused. Multiple times. Sometimes for weeks at a stretch. Because I kept getting severe infections, back to back, while my immune system was being dismantled from the inside.

That's not a story of clean triumph. It's a story of fighting, stopping, recovering enough to fight again, and fighting again.

It's the only story I know how to tell.

What Illness Teaches You About Everything You Touch

When your immune system is compromised the way mine was, first by the cancer itself, then by treatment, you develop a different relationship with your environment.

Everything that touches your body becomes a variable.

Fabrics. Dyes. Detergents. Finishes. The things that most people never think about become things you have to think about every single day.

I also developed Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, MCAS, a condition in which the immune system's mast cells fire inappropriately and excessively in response to triggers that wouldn't affect most people. For me, this has meant skin reactions, severe anaphylactic episodes requiring hospitalization, gastrointestinal symptoms, and an immune system that has become, in certain ways, its own worst enemy.

I was later diagnosed with systemic mastocytosis, a disorder of the mast cells themselves: my body makes too many of them, and they aren't normal.

MCAS is what the cells do.

Mastocytosis is what they are.

My immunoglobulin levels, the markers of immune memory and antibody function, have remained critically low.

This critically low immune system is called Hypogammaglobulinemia. Almost as many syllables as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but nowhere near as fun to say.

What it means: my body's ability to recognize and defend against threats has been systematically eroded.

I started wearing a mask every time I walked through the house, so I'd never have to ask my kids to wait while I found one. On the hardest nights, the nights I couldn't manage even that, I couldn't be in the same room as my own children at all.

No hugs. No goodnights. Just a closed door, and the sound of them on the other side of it.

The infections that paused my treatment weren't bad luck. They were the predictable consequence of what cancer and treatment do to a body's defenses.

And through all of it. Through every hospitalization, every paused infusion, every protocol adjusted and adjusted again, there was this quiet reality that I kept coming back to:

For eight hours every night, whatever I was sleeping on was touching my face, my scalp, my neck. The most sensitive surface on my body.

The place where inflammation shows first and heals last.

Most of those nights, I would have neck sweats too, which meant whatever chemicals were sitting in that fabric weren't just resting against my skin.

They were being driven into it.

My hair, already fragile from treatment, would soak through with sweat overnight, stick to my neck and scalp, and knot into something I'd have to work through strand by strand every morning before I could even get out of bed.

Most pillowcases are processed with chemical finishes, synthetic dyes, or blended with materials that carry allergen risk. Even products marketed as "pure silk" vary enormously in actual quality: momme weight, silk grade, certification status, dye process. I was spending every waking hour managing what went into my body.

And every sleeping hour on something I couldn't fully trust.

That was the problem I decided to solve.

Why Silk. Why This Silk.

I didn't choose silk for its glamour, though there is glamour in it.

I chose silk because of its biology. Mulberry silk, true, Grade 6A, 25-momme 100% mulberry silk, is produced from the fibers of the Bombyx mori silkworm and is composed primarily of fibroin, a naturally hypoallergenic protein fiber.

It doesn't conduct heat the way cotton does. It doesn't create the friction that synthetic fabrics do. It doesn't harbor dust mites or microbial growth the way organic cotton can over time.

For skin: silk's smooth surface reduces the repetitive micro-friction that contributes to sleep creases, morning puffiness, and barrier disruption in sensitive or reactive skin.

For women managing eczema, rosacea, contact dermatitis, or post-treatment skin sensitivity, the kind of sensitivity that comes from chemotherapy, targeted therapy, or the immune dysregulation that follows, that friction matters.

Every morning of reduced inflammation isn't a small thing. It's a material thing.

For hair: silk pillowcases reduce the mechanical stress that causes breakage, frizz, and cuticle damage. Particularly for women managing chemotherapy-related hair changes, hair loss, or regrowth. The hair that comes back after treatment is fragile and different.

It deserves a different surface.

But not all silk is the same. The silk industry is rife with misrepresentation. Blended fabrics sold as pure, lower momme weights sold as premium, certifications referenced without verification.

I know, because I researched it the way you research something when your health depends on getting it right.

Every specification in Wink Silk traces back to what I needed my pillowcase to be:

• 25-Momme Weight: the threshold at which silk becomes genuinely durable, temperature-regulating, and substantial enough to deliver its full benefits night after night.
• Grade 6A 100% Mulberry Silk: the highest available grade. Tightly constructed, uniformly lustrous, with minimal variation in fiber thickness that would compromise the surface smoothness I needed against my skin.
• A GOTS-Certified Silk House: our pillowcase silk is crafted by a house certified to the Global Organic Textile Standard, GOTS license 00284622. Not a label. An independently audited standard that restricts the synthetic pesticides, chemical finishes and dye compounds most likely to trigger a reactive immune system. The certificate is public. Look it up.
• OEKO-TEX® Standard 100: Certificate 22.HCN.30712, issued by Hohenstein. Tests the finished fabric against more than 1,000 regulated and unregulated chemicals, including the exact compounds most likely to be driven into skin under heat and moisture. The same conditions night sweats create against skin for eight hours at a time.
• Clean Dye Process: including our founding colorway, Coy™, developed in Pantone 7499C. Every color in the Wink Silk palette was selected and developed with dye safety as a primary criterion, not an afterthought.

Momme weight. Grade. Certified fiber origin. Verified chemical safety.

Together, this is the standard I named Performance Luxury Silk™. Not a marketing category.

A checklist.

If a silk pillowcase can't document all four, it doesn't meet it. See every spec explained and compared in our 25 momme silk pillowcase guide.

This isn't luxury for the sake of luxury. This is luxury in its most honest form: the best possible material, made the right way, designed for what the body actually needs.

The Other Half of This Story

I can't tell Wink Silk's story honestly without telling you about Cooper.

Cooper Wise is my husband. He's the Chief Momentum Officer of Wink Silk, the person who has built every piece of the technical and marketing infrastructure that makes this brand run. But that description doesn't capture what he actually is to this company, or to me.

Cooper has his own story of what it means to be rebuilt from the inside out.

He survived a rare congenital heart condition as a child that required 2 experimental surgeries to fix. The kind of surgery you don't know is going to work until it does.

He's been through four sleep apnea surgeries. He lost 135 pounds. He recovered from addiction. He's been sober for years. He's a Screen Actors Guild member, a musician, a father of five, and one of the most quietly extraordinary people I know.

His entire philosophy, what he calls Momentary Living, or Momentarianism, with the tagline Stronger by Design, is built on the belief that we are shaped most completely by the moments that nearly break us. That the body, the mind, the character, all of it, can be made stronger by the exact things that were meant to stop it.

Cooper and I have been together for more than 28 years. We built a family, five children, a life, a philosophy, across the full spectrum of what life actually looks like when you live it without flinching.

He built Wink Silk with me the same way he has shown up for everything: completely, and without needing to be asked.

While I was managing infusions and infections and immune panels and MCAS reactions, Cooper was building the infrastructure that would allow me to build something of my own.

Shopify architecture. Brand strategy. Keyword systems. Supply chain. Manufacturer relationships. Certification sourcing. He didn't build it for me. He built it with me, because he understood what it meant for me to have something beautiful to build.

That's the marriage behind this brand. And I think it shows.

Building Wink Silk While Still in the Fight

Here's what I want to be honest about, because I'm not interested in giving you a version of this story where everything is resolved and I'm standing on the other side of illness telling you what I learned.

I'm still in it.

My LDH has been elevated. My immunoglobulin levels remain critically low. The questions around my ongoing immune status, possible disease evolution, and what comes next medically aren't answered. I'm still being monitored. I'm still navigating the intersection of CLL, MCAS, systemic mastocytosis, and hypogammaglobulinemia in ways that require specialist coordination and the kind of daily management that has become, simply, part of my life.

At night I wear a small pulse oximeter on my finger.

Not because I'm sick enough to need it.

Because I stopped trusting my body to tell me when something was wrong.

I check it every morning. Most mornings, it tells me I slept fine.

That's the best news I get all day.

My kids are older now.

They know why the door was closed.

Some nights, it still is.

And they know why I'm building this.

Cooper never once asked me to stop.

I built Wink Silk while still in the fight.

Not because I was finished healing. I haven't been. Not because everything was resolved. It isn't. But because I understood something that serious illness makes very clear:

That's what this brand is.

Not a survivor story with a tidy ending.

A living one.

Who Wink Silk Is For

Every product decision we make is made with a specific woman in mind.

She may be managing a chronic illness or autoimmune condition: lupus, MS, fibromyalgia, CLL, MCAS, hypersensitivity disorders, and has learned to be as deliberate about what touches her body as she is about what goes into it.

She may be in active cancer treatment or post-treatment recovery, navigating chemotherapy-related skin sensitivity, hair loss, regrowth, or the residual immune compromise that persists long after the last infusion.

She may have reactive or sensitive skin, eczema, rosacea, contact dermatitis, and has cycled through enough "gentle" products to know that the word means nothing without transparency about what's actually in the fabric.

She may simply be a woman who has decided that the eight hours she spends sleeping aren't an afterthought.

That what touches her skin all night deserves the same scrutiny she brings to everything else in her life.

She's the woman we make every decision for.

The Founding Pillowcase

Our founding product is the Douceur Doublure™ Silk Pillowcase, a French phrase meaning softness, gentleness, sweetness.

Chosen deliberately.

It's made from 2 layers of 25-momme Grade 6A 100% Mulberry silk, crafted by our GOTS-certified silk house (GOTS license 00284622). Available in our founding colorway, Coy™, a soft, luminous warm ivory developed in Pantone 7499C.

Every element of the Douceur Doublure™ was designed from scratch: the momme weight, the grade specification, the certification requirements, the zipper closure (because envelope closures slip; zippers secure), the dye palette, the finish.

Nothing was chosen by default.

This is the product I needed and couldn't find.

So I made it.

There are 330. Number 001 is mine. Number 002 is Cooper’s. Ten of the first twelve numbers are set aside for the people who carried me through chemo. The rest are for the women who read this page and decide to be part of it.

The Wink Silk Promise

A Note on Wink Privé

Wink Silk's membership program, Wink Privé, is built for the women who find us and stay. Members of our community are called Les Averties, French for "the women who know." It comes from an old French saying, une femme avertie en vaut deux: a woman who knows is worth two. Because that's exactly who this space is for.

Whether you're managing a health condition, building a sleep ritual, or simply choosing to stop settling for what's available and start insisting on what's right:

You are seen here, and you are welcome here.

Tiers within Wink Privé, Nacre, Souple, Lumière, Privée, Vigueur, Intime, reflect the depth of the relationship, not a hierarchy of worth.

Every woman who comes through this door comes in with her own story.

We're here to honor it.

What We Believe

We believe that sleep isn't passive. It's the body's primary act of restoration, and what you sleep on is part of the protocol.

We believe that women managing chronic illness, immune disorders, skin conditions, and cancer treatment deserve access to products designed with their biology as the starting point, not added on afterward as a marketing angle.

We believe that the word organic and the word certified should mean something specific, and we refuse to use them any other way.

We believe that building something beautiful while fighting something hard isn't a contradiction.

It's the most human thing there is.

And we believe that the woman who has been through the most, the one managing the most, carrying the most, fighting the hardest, deserves to sleep on something extraordinary.

She's earned it.

In ways most people will never know.

One date sits underneath all of this. September 6 is the day Cooper and I began, and the same date, six years later, that he blindfolded me, drove me back to the Spanish classroom where we'd met our junior year of high school, arranged the desks exactly as they had been that day, sat me in the exact seat where he first saw me, and asked me to marry him. It has nothing to do with a launch. It's just the reason there's a company here at all.

Wink Silk makes Performance Luxury Silk™ pillowcases, sleep masks and scrunchies in 25 momme, Grade 6A mulberry silk, a richer, fuller silk than the 22 momme many leading brands use, crafted by a GOTS & OEKO-TEX® certified silk house (GOTS license 00284622; OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certificates 22.HCN.30712 and 19.HCN.84688). Wink Silk was founded by Erin Wise, Founder and CEO and a mother of five, and built alongside Cooper Wise, Chief Momentum Officer. We are based in Newport Beach, California.